adminFrom academia to becoming a hotelier
Ok, I know, it’s the question on everybody’s lips that you are too polite to ask. Why did I transfer out of academia into hotelling at this time of life? And what of all those years I was locked inside academia looking out at the world turning? Have I turned my back on my life’s work just so I can stand in front of a Grade II* listed stately home with my hands in my pockets?
Answer: Of course not, and yes, totally.
Last October I was idly browsing through Rightmove, a well-known UK based website that advertises houses for sale. Just to see how house values were changing in the area. Up popped ‘Rudby Hall’ – a place I had never heard of that was just 10 miles away in the North Yorkshire countryside. It had been on the market for a year. I can’t fully explain why I did what I did next, but I thought I would ring the estate agent to ask for a viewing. Two days later I entered through the gates for the first time. Cool as a cucumber, I met the management and by the end of that 2-hour meeting I knew exactly what I wanted to do next. Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, the opportunity of a lifetime was within my grasp. Which made me think I had been looking for this for a long time, and that leap from Rightmove to the phone was no impulsive and frivolous gesture, but a serious and opportunistic attempt to fulfill a missing need in my life.
Sometimes you have to take a leap
A change from academia to another life is not unusual. Many colleagues over the years have left the sector for one reason or another. I suppose what is unusual from my perspective is the timing and the context. Swapping a permanent job with regular income and a pension, ten years before planned retirement, and founding a new company in a crowded sector during a cost-of-living crisis may seem like I lost a marble or two. But actually, this specific opportunity had ‘potential’ scribbled all over it.
Sometimes, you’ve got to take a leap in a direction you want, even if it looks risky. For several years, I had thought of taking on a small B&B in the countryside with Suze, maybe six beds and a cottage garden. But then serendipity played a blinder. We had a window of opportunity to scale up our ideas and have a grand adventure and so one day last October, having decided that such an opportunity was unlikely to come around ever again, we formed RudbyGroup Ltd and went for it. Our decision was not an impulsive mid-life crisis but an amazing alignment of heart, mind, timing, context, availability and joint decision making. We could have walked away and lost nothing, but forever after we would be asking ‘what if…?’ Neither of us wanted to regret not trying so we decided to go for it and put our transferable skills to the test.
From serendipity to storms
We got hold of the keys last December, just in time for Christmas. We welcomed guests who had already booked to take the place over during the Christmas break and we left them to it. Not a bad start. But then – disaster. The storms hit hard; trees were falling down all around us, pipes were bursting, water was gushing through the ceiling. We had to suddenly find out where the stop tap was located. Turned out there were several dotted around the place, and it was crucial not to turn off the wrong one or the heating system would implode (or something).
In all of this we had to forge ahead with getting the business going. You may think ‘buyers regret’ at this point, but we could not afford to lose what we knew was our opportunity of a lifetime. It wasn’t a case of sunk costs keeping us bound to the place, but more a belief that we would reach a better place by the spring, so long as we didn’t pull the wrong lever somewhere.
My life’s work, gone?
Many people at a certain point in their lives audit themselves and wonder what might have happened if they had done X instead of Y. I had reached a point in my life where I had spent well over 30 years in the higher-education sector. It was, I decided, time to leave the cocoon of a permanent position for something that promised to challenge me far beyond the cyclic and entirely predictable nature of the academic calendar. Serendipity was about to help enormously. First off, all the University sector was in the middle of shedding jobs for reasons I will not go into here – if you know you know. Second, I was at a time of life where family responsibilities had changed. Third, I found a new challenge to keep my brain going just when it was getting a bit tired.
I look at my life’s work – the publications, the lectures and presentations, collaborations etc and feel at peace with what I achieved, or didn’t achieve, during my time as an academic. Most academic careers end in retirement, rather than failure. I made the choice to retire early rather than to continue verging on the edge of failure.
Before anyone leaps to my defence, let me contextualise ‘failure’. I have not failed in the sense of a car failing its MOT due to a lack of maintenance. My failure is that which faces many academics who need to not only do world-class research but also make a world-class difference to the world through what is termed ‘impact’. Working at the interface of the academic and wider world (for example with World Health Organization) was a stark reminder for myself that research outputs that are aiming for ‘impact’ are really valued only retrospectively, and only if they fit with policy and other determinants outside the researcher’s control.
Suppose a policy-oriented organisation has taken an interest in a particular topic (maybe due to lobbying, maybe due to personal interests in the organisation, or whatever). For the sake of argument, let us suppose they select ‘climate change and NTDs’ to understand which interventions work best for combatting NTDs in the face of climate change. The meta-analysis reveals there are no solutions, because the research is all about how climate change may affect NTD transmission, not interventions. That exercise immediately severely limits the ‘impact’ potential of a whole field of research, because it has no answers that policy makers can use.
Anyway, that is all in the past. I cook breakfasts now, and welcome guests, and look forward every morning to making a difference to people for two or three days at a time. Not very scalable, nor generalisable, nor impactful. Just nice.
